One of The most ambitious space tourism mission in history has launched, with an all-commercial crew set to achieve a number of milestones in its five days in space, including the first-ever privately funded crewed spacewalk.
The mission, called Polaris Dawn, lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida today, Tuesday, September 10, at 5:23 a.m. Eastern Time. The four-person crew, riding inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle atop one of the California company’s Falcon 9 rockets, consists of Jared Isaacman, the billionaire who funded the mission, SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, and pilot Scott Poteet.
Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, says the mission’s pioneering spacewalk is in some ways “a gimmick.” “But if we look at it as developing the ability, independent of NASA, to do spacewalks, that’s potentially important,” he says.
Initially scheduled for delayed August, the Polaris Dawn launch was delayed first by technical and weather issues and later by the failed landing of another Falcon 9 rocket, which caused the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to temporarily ground the Falcon 9 fleet. The crew remained in quarantine throughout the duration but was busy additional training.
After liftoff, the Crew Dragon spacecraft was placed in an orbit that will take it to an altitude of 1,400 kilometers above Earth’s surface, making it the farthest astronauts have traveled from Earth since the Apollo 17 mission to the moon in 1972, and the highest altitude ever reached by a woman. “This is the farthest humans have traveled since the last time we walked on the moon,” Isaacman said in pre-flight briefing at Kennedy Space Center on August 19.
Isaacman, CEO of US payments company Shift4, flew into space earlier in September 2021 as part of the Inspiration4 mission. That mission, which also flew on the SpaceX Crew Dragon, cost about up to 200 million dollarsshowed that SpaceX is willing to let the ultra-rich pay for the ultimate thrill, a trip to orbit as a space tourist. (The cost of the Polaris Dawn mission was not disclosed.)
Space tourism missions have taken place many times before, starting from 2001 when American businessman Dennis Tito became the first paying customer on a Russian Soyuz capsule to the International Space Station (ISS). Over the past few years, dozens of paying customers from companies like Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin have also made compact suborbital “jumps” into space lasting minutes.
But Crew Dragon, partly funded by almost 5 billion dollars NASA money to transport astronauts to and from the ISS after the space shuttles were retired in 2011, brings a whole up-to-date dimension to such missions. The vehicle, about as airy as a enormous car with room for seven passengers, could launch flights to Earth orbit, not just to the ISS, and enable up-to-date types of missions.